1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a tumbler for tumbling bodies of killed furred animals, and comprising a cavity which is defined by a substantially cylindrical, horizontally-oriented tube which is limited by a first and a second end wall, respectively comprising a feed-in opening for the bodies of mink and a discharge opening, said tumbler being made to rotate around its horizontal axis by means of a motor-driven drive mechanism, and where the inner wall of said tumbler comprises a number of carriers.
2. Description of Related Art
In UK Patent Application GB 1271931 A (Cyril Norris & Son Ltd) there is disclosed a tumbler with a helical transport arrangement for the handling of pelts and other articles. The tumbler has two ends which comprise a feed-in opening and a discharge opening. A chute is placed in the discharge opening for the removal of the pelts, and the inner wall of the tumbler is provided with carriers. The tumbler is provided with a helical transport unit which ensures that the pelts are fed continuously from the feed-in opening to the discharge opening.
Such tumblers are used in connection with the production of pelts, where the killed furred animals are laid for cooling before the actual skinning takes place. It is necessary, however, to carry out a mechanical handling of the dead bodies before the skinning is carried out. The tumbling of the bodies takes place immediately after the animals are killed, and is carried out together with a liquid-absorbing particulate medium, which most often consists of sawdust, which has good absorption characteristics, while at the same time being inexpensive to procure. With the tumbling of the not-yet cooled bodies, saliva, urine, faeces and other impurities are removed from the bodies, so that the presence of these impurities does not reduce the quality of the pelts and be of any inconvenience during the subsequent skinning of the killed animals.
During the skinning season, there are sometimes killed a greater number of animals than it is possible to skin, with the result that there is typically undertaken a cooling of the bodies for later skinning. There will herewith arise a stiffness in the bodies, which it is desirable to eliminate before the skinning takes place, inasmuch as the skinning of stiff dead bodies of furred animals is difficult and time consuming. Therefore, it will be expedient to remove said stiffness, which can be done by carrying out a mechanical handling of the bodies, and for this purpose use is once again made of tumblers.
The tumbling of the bodies takes place together with a suitable particulate material, e.g., sawdust, in order to absorb the fluids as mentioned above, with the result that dust is formed in the room in which the tumbling is carried out. The tumblers which are known today function in accordance with the batch principle, i.e. a certain number of bodies are fed into the tumbler together with a certain amount of sawdust, after which the tumbler is closed and set in operation. The tumbling of the bodies is implemented over a certain period of time, after which the bodies are removed from the tumbler. Some of the known types of tumblers require that their rotation be actually stopped, manual removal of the tumbled bodies and filling with a new batch of bodies to be tumbled. However, newer types of tumblers of the disclosed kind are self-emptying, but here the bodies are discharged in a random manner and often in “clumps” together with the sawdust, which is swept together and fed manually back into the tumbler. But this does not change the fact that the tumbler must be stopped for filling with new, un-tumbled bodies and the used, collected sawdust, to which a fresh supply of sawdust has possibly been added, after which the tumbling is started anew. However, this type of tumbler can be used only for the tumbling of bodies, and is thus unusable for the tumbling of pelts, where use is made of a tumbler with an open wall structure like a gravel screen, where the sawdust which is added to the pelts after skinning and scraping is removed before the pelts are led away to be taned in the taning plant. This means that a pelt processing plant today must contain not only tumblers for tumbling the bodies from killed furred animals, but also another type of tumbler for tumbling of the pelts from these for removal of sawdust before the pelts are taned prior to the subsequent drying procedure.
Both the batch-wise mode of operation that the known body tumblers work in accordance with, where the tumbler must be stopped after each tumbling for the filling of new bodies, the feeding-back of sawdust, the fact that two types of tumblers are required in order to carry out the necessary handling of the pelts before they are taned and dried, and the fact that the tumbled bodies, when use is made of tumblers that are self-emptying, are discharged from the tumbler in a quite random manner, results in a great deal of manual work which it will be desirable to reduce. Moreover, since they are space-demanding, it will also be desirable to reduce the number of tumblers in the pelt processing plant.
With the invention it is realised that the above-mentioned problems can be eliminated with a tumbler of the kind disclosed by way of introduction, which is characterised in that the cavity in the tumbler between the filling opening and the discharge opening is divided into a number of sections, preferably two sections, to which the bodies are transferred by a conveyor unit which extends through the tumbler parallel with the longitudinal axis of the tumbler between the first and the second end walls.
It is hereby achieved that the tumbling procedure can be can be carried out in a continuous manner, in that “fresh” un-tumbled bodies can be continuously introduced through the filling opening, where they are tumbled in the first section, and after a certain period of time the tumbled bodies are transferred via the transport unit to the following section, where the tumbling is continued until the tumbling procedure (the determined tumbling time) comes to an end, after which the transport unit leads the bodies out through the discharge opening of the tumbler for further processing. In this manner it is thus not necessary for the tumbler to be stopped when it is emptied of bodies, inasmuch as there is simply carried out a continuous filling of the body tumbler with un-tumbled bodies.